I Wear the Black Hat

Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)

Chuck Klosterman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781439184516
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman "offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero" ( New York magazine). Chuck Klosterman, "The Ethicist" for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985?Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: "By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture—and maybe even American morality." I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that's instantly accessible and really, really funny.

Index

ABBA, 142

ABC, 56, 98

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 165–67, 171–73, 179–80

Adams, Cecil, 10

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (video game), 156

Afghanistan, 144

Afghan War Diary, 144

AFL, 97

AIDS, 105, 113, 151

Airplane! (film), 167, 179

airplane hijacking, 40–42, 54–55

Albarn, Damon, 33

Albom, Mitch, 178

Ali, Muhammad, 50–54, 154, 155

Allen, Marcus, 98

Allen, Woody, 88, 154, 186

Allin, G.G., 158

“Along Came Jones” (Coasters), 10–11

AMC, 47, 48

Ament, Jeff, 172–73

American Experience (TV series), 107

American Gigolo (film), 152

American Psycho (Ellis), 74–75

American Rhapsody (Eszterhas), 109

Amin, Idi, 191

Amos, Tori, 31–32, 113

Andersen, Christopher, 113

anti-Semitism, 185

AOL, 138

Apollonia, 44

Arabian Prince, 95

Arfin, Lesley, 87

Ariel, Washington, 55

Arizona, 160, 162

Arkansas, 122

Aryan Brotherhood, 52

As Nasty as They Wanna Be (2 Live Crew), 78

Assange, Julian, 143–47

Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 130

Atta, Mohamed, 56

Aykroyd, Dan, 152

Backbeat (film), 180

Bananas (film), 154

Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life (play), 10

baseball players, and drug usage, 197–98

Basic Instinct (film), 109–13, 130

Batman character, 59–61, 66, 69–70, 72, 73, 75

Bayless, Skip, 154

BBC, 51

Beastie Boys, 93

Beatles, 6, 53, 180, 189

Beavis and Butt-head (TV series), 131

Bell, Roland, 48

Bell, Stringer (fictional character, The Wire), 48, 50

Belushi, John, 152

Berman, Chris, 154

Bias, Len, 49

Big Con, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Preface
• What You Say About His Company Is What You Say About Society
• Another Thing That Interests Me About the Eagles Is That I [Am Contractually Obligated to] Hate Them
• Villains Who Are Not Villains
• Easier Than Typing
• Perpetual Topeka
• Human Clay
• Without a Gun They Can’t Get None
• Arrested for Smoking
• Electric Funeral
• This Zeitgeist is Making Me Thirsty
• “I Am Perplexed” [This Is Why, This Is Why, This Is Why They Hate You]
• Crime and Punishment (or the Lack Thereof)
• Hitler Is in the Book
• The Problem of Overrated Ideas
• Acknowledgments
• About Chuck Klosterman
• ‘But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past’ Excerpt
• Index
• Copyright